So I have a question for the old hands:

How did it work with cocktail arcade tables back in the day (early 80s). Were there dedicated cocktail tables in Australia made by the developers of the actual games (Atari, Nintendo, etc.) or were all the cocktail tables here made by Australian manufacturers like Hankin? Would operators buy a local machine and then get the boards from overseas or did the tables come with a game already installed? What if an operator wanted to swap out a game? Were there restrictions about what tables could have which games installed in them? Were there cocktail tables where you could select and play more than one game?

Sorry, a lot of questions, but I didn't pay much attention when I was growing up as I only played pinball.

The places I worked for and indeed my own small runs all used dedicated tables and uprights of one type or another. There were no such thing as multi boards. There were many manufacturers back in the day and during the peak rush many machines were air freighted direct from japan mainly in the thousands (mainly genuine Taito Space Invader uprights). The airfreight costs were recovered in just a few weeks. I even air freighted a "Choplifter" directly, stupidly declining the sellers offer of this new game "Pacman" 

One place I worked for in Brisbane built their own tables and used very high quality Sanwa monitors. They were a very nicely put together "no-name" table and I was pretty happy being involved in the construction of them in the heyday.

When you rotated games from site to site usually you would change the machine for a new one. Later, when things settled a bit it became easier to swap boards because they all changed over to JAMMA edge connectors.